Skip to main content

Windows 10: Prevent Wi-Fi settings being shared with contacts

·169 words·1 min
tech sysadmin technology windows windows-10 wireless
James Pettigrove
Author
James Pettigrove
Cloud Engineer with a focus on Microsoft Azure

Windows 10 introduced a feature named Wi-Fi Sense. This feature will share your saved Wi-Fi configuration, including WEP and WPA passwords with your contacts across various platforms.

This feature hasn’t been received well, and namely so. Not everyone wants to share their home Wi-Fi with every John, Dick & Harry they have on Facebook.

If you didn’t turn this off at the time of installation or upgrade (bet you didn’t click on Advanced Options huh…), let’s do this now:

  1. Click Start button, search for change wi-fi and click on Change Wi-Fi s****ettings
  2. Scroll down to the bottom and click Manage Wi-Fi settings
  3. Change the slider on Connect to networks shared by my contacts from On to Off as pictured below:

While you are there, I would strongly suggest doing the latter step for Connect to suggested open hotspots too. No one should be automatically connecting to insecure wi-fi networks.

Microsoft had their heart in the right place but in today’s increasing volatile cyber world, this isn’t their smartest play.

Related

Windows 10: Turn off peer to peer Windows Update function
·206 words·1 min
tech p2p sysadmin technology windows windows-10 windows-update
Microsoft, in a effort to reduce load on their own server farms as well as provided a better experience to customers when using Windows Update, Windows 10 introduces peer to peer technology (like Bittorrent uses) to deliver Windows update.
Fix error 80240020 when upgrading to Windows 10
·92 words·1 min
tech sysadmin technology windows windows-10 windows-update
So you heard the news and decided to update to Windows 10 but your Windows Update threw an 80240020 error?
Windows Server & System Center Technical Preview
·216 words·2 mins
system-administration tech sysadmin system-center technology windows windows-10 windows-server
Hot on the heels of the Windows 10 Technical Preview release, Microsoft have now added the Windows Server and accompanying System Center Technical Preview for the masses.